What Color is Your Jockstrap?

What Color is Your Jockstrap?: Funny Men and Women Write from the Road, ed. By Jennifer L. Leo (2006)

Leo returns with another installment in the Travelers’ Tales series. The book provides laughs even in the short introduction, as the editor recalls another parody title from a previous volume, The Thong Also Rises. Other titles from the series include Whose Panties Are These?, and There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled.

Leo’s latest collection includes over 35 stories, all written by different authors about their adventures and misadventures experienced while away from home. The tales themselves are as diverse as the locales, from China to thousands of miles above the earth.

Frequent air travelers will appreciate Susan Orlean’s short “Skymalling,” an appropriately titled piece about the popular in-flight catalog. Writes Orlean, “Skymall is the land of products I never think I want, serving needs I never thought I had, and which I can’t quite bring myself to buy but can’t help considering once they have been brought to my attention.”

The reader is reminded that there are often many bumps in road while traveling: Bill Fink writes about his challenges with some particularly severe innkeepers while traveling in Italy in “The Hostile Hostel.” Scott Turner pens a hilarious essay whose title is borderline unbloggable—suffice it to write that it concerns the challenges of dealing with a municipal sewage utility in Eastern Africa. (Full disclosure: the reviewer knows Turner professionally.)

Those who enjoy the thrill of the hunt (for a mate, that is) may enjoy Sara R. Levine’s racy account of bar hopping in “Hip-Hop Hustle, Oaxaca-Style.” A less provocative tale of romance on the road is Kayla Allen’s “Making Eyes in Paris.”

Of course, not all trips are to idyllic locales. In “Trying Hard to Like India,” Seth Stevenson writes of the difficulty of enjoying the destination while being constantly confronted by people in poverty. Tamara Sheward recalls her ill-advised trip to a war zone in “Day Trip to Chechnya.” In spite of the subject matter even these tales have moments of comic relief.

Obviously, this is not a book for the whole family, but for the adult reader who isn’t put off by the quirky or risqué there are a lot of laughs to be had here.